Do you feel as if the country is full of hopeless fools, shrugging or even cheering all manner of outrages? If you’re feeling pretty good these days, how did you feel on the morning after Election Day 2012? If you loved that day, how did you feel in 2004? 2000? 2016?

At times, gloomy American conservatives have looked at their country and found it hedonistic and abandoning traditional values lackadaisically, ignorant of its own history, lazy and unwilling to take responsibility, dependent, whining, spoiled, and unappreciative of its freedoms.

Gloomy American liberals see a country obsessed with material success, happily embracing selfish consumerism, callous to the poor, quick to lash out at those who are different, and prone to violence.

Some of us are outraged that our country doesn’t offer government-covered health insurance for all; others, that it allows abortion on demand. We can be outraged that our country invaded Iraq or that it did nothing as Syria turned into a charnel house. We can seethe at the fact that our country executes those on death row or that many of those convicted of murder will live out their days, housed and fed at taxpayer expense.

But are those reasons ever enough to make us stop loving our country? Should they ever be?